A new draft executive order is floating around Washington. On Tuesday, The Washington Postreported that the Trump administration may be considering a measure that would “deny admission to any alien who is likely to become a public charge,” meaning they would need benefits like food stamps, housing assistance, or Medicaid. Current law already allows immigration officers to deny people admission if they may become dependent on these programs, but in 1999, the government issued a guidance narrowing the scope and applicability of this clause. In recent years, Republican politicians have frequentlyaccused the Obama administration of not enforcing the measure at all.

Related Story

The United States has a long history of denying public support to immigrants. Some policies were put into place not too long ago—Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare-reform legislation severely restricted immigrants’ access to benefits, as the Post points out. The country also has a long history of denying entry to immigrants who come from poverty, as the historian Hidetaka Hirota writes in his new book, Expelling the Poor. The language of the Trump administration’s alleged new proposal is not a departure from past policies, but a continuation. And as in the past, the new policy may lead to discrimination, whether implicit or overt.

I talked with Hirota, a visiting assistant professor at the City College of New York, about the way poverty has shaped government policies on immigration. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Emma Green: What’s the historical connection between poverty and immigration restrictions in the United States?

Hidetaka Hirota: Immigration restriction in the United States was rooted in poverty. The British colonists introduced a law which regulated the movement of the poor, including the expulsion of poor people from their territory. That model developed into passenger laws for prohibiting the landing of poor people. The critical turning point came in the 1840s and ’50s, when a large number of impoverished Irish immigrants arrived in the United States. New York and Massachusetts were two major receiving states. They responded by enhancing and strengthening their laws to more effectively restrict the immigration of poor Irish people.

This really laid a framework for immigration control in the United States. In the 1870s, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared some of the state passenger laws unconstitutional, these two states started a campaign to transform their state laws into federal laws. The result was America’s first national immigration laws.

Green: How do you tease apart Americans’ economic reasons for wanting to keep immigrants out versus cultural or religious prejudice?

Hirota: These laws were targeted against poor immigrants, rather than against all Irish immigrants. In that sense, the poverty of immigrants was at the core of state-level immigration policy.

But at the same time, such policy would not have developed if there was no strong cultural and religious prejudice, especially against Irish Catholics. Ethnic prejudice really facilitated the formation of state policies that targeted the destitute.

“Law enforcement was never equal. It was always shaped by the enforcing officers’ personal prejudices and racism.”

Green: What was the distinction in early American immigration laws between those who were poor and those who had skills or were wealthy?

Hirota: If you had skills or resources, there was no obstacle for landing. But if you were poor and didn’t have financial resources, you wouldn’t be allowed to enter the United States unless the shipmaster paid a bond to the government—money that could be spent if people became paupers and required public assistance.

According to The Washington Post, the Trump administration will seek to deny any alien who is “likely to become a public charge.” This clause has a notorious history, precisely because of the vagueness and subjective nature of the adjective “likely.” The term comes from state-level passenger laws. Massachusetts used the term in the 18th century, and New York did, too.

The tricky thing about this clause is that officers could reject immigrants even if they were not actually paupers—officers could interpret the adjective “likely” in any way they liked. The clause was a convenient tool to inject religious, ethnic, and racial prejudice into technically neutral immigration law.

Green: One thing that’s been clear in the last week or so, since President Trump released his first executive order on immigration and refugees, is that low-level bureaucrats and officers have a lot of power to interpret and enforce the law as they like. What power have those kinds of people had historically in shaping American immigration?

Hirota: From the moment of the introduction of the clause, it was abused by officers who already had personal prejudices against particular immigrants. In the mid-19th century, the target was the Irish. Even if an immigrant had a sufficient amount of money at the time of arrival, immigration officers excluded some people on the ground that there was no demand for their employment. So officers regarded them as “likely to become a public charge.”

One immigration scholar in the early 20th century noted that this clause was used as the “miscellaneous” reason to exclude immigrants when officials didn’t like them but couldn’t find appropriate grounds for their rejection. The vagueness of “likely” gave flexible ground for exclusion, to the extent that anyone could be denied landing.

“In the 19th century, anti-Irish nativists called immigrants ‘leeches’ on American taxpayers.”

Green: It seems like a large portion of the people who have made arduous journeys over sea and land to come to the United States were doing so in hopes of finding a better economic life. Was there ever a time when immigrants were not largely poor?

Hirota: The vast majority of immigrants were poor, that’s for sure. The distinction nativists and immigration officers hoped to make was whether an immigrant could work or not. As long as a person appeared to be employable, that’s fine.

But the criteria for self-sufficiency remained vague so that officers could determine certain groups of immigrants as non-self-sufficient. Even though many of the immigrants were poor, some were more likely to be labeled as paupers than others. Law enforcement was never equal. It was always shaped by the enforcing officers’ personal prejudices and racism.

Green: How does this compare to immigration policy today? What’s similar and different?

Hirota: I see more parallels than differences, honestly. Trump’s potential executive order is targeted against immigrants who will allegedly consume public taxpayer funds. In the 19th century, anti-Irish nativists called immigrants “leeches” on American taxpayers, saying they should be deported back to Ireland as soon as possible.

The people “threatening” the United States have changed. Earlier, it was the Irish, and then later, it was the Chinese and Asians. Now it’s Muslims and undocumented immigrants from Latin America. But I think the fundamental language—such as “national security” and “national peace”—remain the same. Immigration control is always justified as a matter of the community’s right to protect its citizens from external threats. This language has remained the same from the 19th century to today.

“Poverty-based immigration control can be really dangerous, precisely because it seems racially and ethnically neutral.”

Green: People sometimes portray the U.S. as a land that welcomes strangers and immigrants with open arms, pointing to Emma Lazarus and the Statue of Liberty as evidence. Those who protested against Trump’s execute order at airports this past weekend certainly relied on that narrative.

But that’s a fiction, right? The United States has always had strong policies of exclusion accompanying its welcoming spirit.

Hirota: The United States has been a nation of immigrants and a major receptor of those seeking freedom—no doubt. It is a U.S. tradition to accept people who need to come to this country.

But at the same time, the unfortunate historical fact is that nativism has been integral to the American experience. We want to be welcoming. But the fact is that some forms of restriction have always existed in the U.S.

Hirota: One of the most important long-term legacies is what immigration scholars call the plenary-power doctrine. It’s basically a doctrine that assumes that congressional immigration policy is beyond judicial review for constitutionality. Within that framework, immigration officers could do anything with undesirable foreigners or aliens.

The doctrine is now weaker than it was, but still, it’s at play in immigration policy. Law enforcers have massive power over the fate of newcomers. And the roots of that doctrine and a harsh mental attitude toward immigrants really came from the state-level treatment of destitute Irish immigrants.

The “likely to become a public charge” clause—poverty-based immigration control—can be really dangerous, precisely because it seems racially and ethnically neutral. Historically, the clause allowed racial and religious bigotry to flourish by giving too much power to law enforcers.

Most Popular

Five times a day for the past three months, an app called WeCroak has been telling me I’m going to die. It does not mince words. It surprises me at unpredictable intervals, always with the same blunt message: “Don’t forget, you’re going to die.”

Sending these notices is WeCroak’s sole function. They arrive “at random times and at any moment just like death,” according to the app’s website, and are accompanied by a quote meant to encourage “contemplation, conscious breathing or meditation.” Though the quotes are not intended to induce nausea and despair, this is sometimes their effect. I’m eating lunch with my husband one afternoon when WeCroak presents a line from the Zen poet Gary Snyder: “The other side of the ‘sacred’ is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.”

The president is the common thread between the recent Republican losses in Alabama, New Jersey, and Virginia.

Roy Moore was a uniquely flawed and vulnerable candidate. But what should worry Republicans most about his loss to Democrat Doug Jones in Tuesday’s U.S. Senate race in Alabama was how closely the result tracked with the GOP’s big defeats last month in New Jersey and Virginia—not to mention how it followed the pattern of public reaction to Donald Trump’s perpetually tumultuous presidency.

Jones beat Moore with a strong turnout and a crushing lead among African Americans, a decisive advantage among younger voters, and major gains among college-educated and suburban whites, especially women. That allowed Jones to overcome big margins for Moore among the key elements of Trump’s coalition: older, blue-collar, evangelical, and nonurban white voters.

Russia's strongman president has many Americans convinced of his manipulative genius. He's really just a gambler who won big.

I. The Hack

The large, sunny room at Volgograd State University smelled like its contents: 45 college students, all but one of them male, hunched over keyboards, whispering and quietly clacking away among empty cans of Juicy energy drink. “It looks like they’re just picking at their screens, but the battle is intense,” Victor Minin said as we sat watching them.

Clustered in seven teams from universities across Russia, they were almost halfway into an eight-hour hacking competition, trying to solve forensic problems that ranged from identifying a computer virus’s origins to finding secret messages embedded in images. Minin was there to oversee the competition, called Capture the Flag, which had been put on by his organization, the Association of Chief Information Security Officers, or ARSIB in Russian. ARSIB runs Capture the Flag competitions at schools all over Russia, as well as massive, multiday hackathons in which one team defends its server as another team attacks it. In April, hundreds of young hackers participated in one of them.

Brushing aside attacks from Democrats, GOP negotiators agree on a late change in the tax bill that would reduce the top individual income rate even more than originally planned.

For weeks, Republicans have brushed aside the critique—brought by Democrats and backed up by congressional scorekeepers and independent analysts—that their tax plan is a bigger boon to the rich than a gift to the middle class.

On Wednesday, GOP lawmakers demonstrated their confidence as clearly as they could, by giving a deeper tax cut to the nation’s top earners.

A tentative agreement struck by House and Senate negotiators would reduce the highest marginal tax rate to 37 percent from 39.6 percent, in what appears to be the most significant change to the bills passed by each chamber in the last month. The proposal final tax bill would also reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, rather than the 20 percent called for in the initial House and Senate proposals, according to a Republican aide privy to the private talks.

If Democratic candidate Doug Jones had lost to GOP candidate Roy Moore, weakened as he was by a sea of allegations of sexual assault and harassment, then some of the blame would have seemed likely to be placed on black turnout.

But Jones won, according to the Associated Press, and that script has been flipped on its head. Election Day defied the narrative and challenged traditional thinking about racial turnout in off-year and special elections. Precincts in the state’s Black Belt, the swathe of dark, fertile soil where the African American population is concentrated, long lines were reported throughout the day, and as the night waned and red counties dominated by rural white voters continued to report disappointing results for Moore, votes surged in from urban areas and the Black Belt. By all accounts, black turnout exceeded expectations, perhaps even passing previous off-year results. Energy was not a problem.

There’s a fiction at the heart of the debate over entitlements: The carefully cultivated impression that beneficiaries are simply receiving back their “own” money.

One day in 1984, Kurt Vonnegut called.

I was ditching my law school classes to work on the presidential campaign of Walter Mondale, the Democratic candidate against Ronald Reagan, when one of those formerly-ubiquitous pink telephone messages was delivered to me saying that Vonnegut had called, asking to speak to one of Mondale’s speechwriters.

All sorts of people called to talk to the speechwriters with all sorts of whacky suggestions; this certainly had to be the most interesting. I stared at the 212 phone number on the pink slip, picked up a phone, and dialed.

A voice, so gravelly and deep that it seemed to lie at the outer edge of the human auditory range, rasped, “Hello.” I introduced myself. There was a short pause, as if Vonnegut were fixing his gaze on me from the other end of the line, then he spoke.

So many people watch porn online that the industry’s carbon footprint might be worse now that it was in the days of DVDs and magazines.

Online streaming is a win for the environment. Streaming music eliminates all that physical material—CDs, jewel cases, cellophane, shipping boxes, fuel—and can reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 40 percent or more. Video streaming is still being studied, but the carbon footprint should similarly be much lower than that of DVDs.

Scientists who analyze the environmental impact of the internet tout the benefits of this “dematerialization,” observing that energy use and carbon-dioxide emissions will drop as media increasingly can be delivered over the internet. But this theory might have a major exception: porn.

Since the turn of the century, the pornography industry has experienced two intense hikes in popularity. In the early 2000s, broadband enabled higher download speeds. Then, in 2008, the advent of so-called tube sites allowed users to watch clips for free, like people watch videos on YouTube. Adam Grayson, the chief financial officer of the adult company Evil Angel, calls the latter hike “the great mushroom-cloud porn explosion of 2008.”

In The Emotional Life of the Toddler, the child-psychology and psychotherapy expert Alicia F. Lieberman details the dramatic triumphs and tribulations of kids ages 1 to 3. Some of her anecdotes make the most commonplace of experiences feel like they should be backed by a cinematic instrumental track. Take Lieberman’s example of what a toddler feels while walking across the living room:

When Johnny can walk from one end of the living room to the other without falling even once, he feels invincible. When his older brother intercepts him and pushes him to the floor, he feels he has collapsed in shame and wants to bite his attacker (if only he could catch up with him!) When Johnny’s father rescues him, scolds the brother, and helps Johnny on his way, hope and triumph rise up again in Johnny’s heart; everything he wants seems within reach. When the exhaustion overwhelms him a few minutes later, he worries that he will never again be able to go that far and bursts into tears.

Will the vice president—and the religious right—be rewarded for their embrace of Donald Trump?

No man can serve two masters, the Bible teaches, but Mike Pence is giving it his all. It’s a sweltering September afternoon in Anderson, Indiana, and the vice president has returned to his home state to deliver the Good News of the Republicans’ recently unveiled tax plan. The visit is a big deal for Anderson, a fading manufacturing hub about 20 miles outside Muncie that hasn’t hosted a sitting president or vice president in 65 years—a fact noted by several warm-up speakers. To mark this historic civic occasion, the cavernous factory where the event is being held has been transformed. Idle machinery has been shoved to the perimeter to make room for risers and cameras and a gargantuan American flag, which—along with bleachers full of constituents carefully selected for their ethnic diversity and ability to stay awake during speeches about tax policy—will serve as the TV-ready backdrop for Pence’s remarks.

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”